Race-thinking emerged across the West before it hardened into racist ideology

Evidence

The historical truth of the matter is that race-thinking, with its roots deep in the eighteenth century, emerged simultaneously in all Western countries during the nineteenth century. Racism has been the powerful ideology of imperialistic policies since the turn of our century. It certainly has absorbed and revived all the old patterns of race opinions which, however, by themselves would hardly have been able to create or, for that matter, to degenerate into racism as a Weltanschauung or an ideology. In the middle of the last century, race opinions were still judged by the yardstick of political reason: Tocqueville wrote to Gobineau about the latter’s doctrines, “They are probably wrong and certainly pernicious.” Not until the end of the century were dignity and importance accorded race-thinking as though it had been one of the major spiritual contributions of the Western world. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 431

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt distinguishes diffuse ‘race opinions’ from racism as a full Weltanschauung or ideology — a conceptual distinction foundational for later field arguments.
• XREF: Distinguishing mere opinion from full ideology foreshadows the ideology-as-key-to-history definition she developes in the next paragraph; both belong in the scaffold for Foucault’s discourse and Gramsci’s hegemony. — connects to: Pre-existing white-supremacy folkways, projected onto new immigrants, powered southern and western nativism — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 989